


Rewritten

by Chellann_Nicollares



Category: Rhett & Link
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Angst, Jealousy, M/M, Metafiction, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-25
Updated: 2015-05-18
Packaged: 2018-03-25 15:15:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 16,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3815179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chellann_Nicollares/pseuds/Chellann_Nicollares
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If you have the power to rewrite reality, how far would you go for love?<br/>Rhett has already answered the question, but his actions might lead to his undoing within the very same day.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

It’s one of those days where everything feels just a little _off_.

Link woke up and frowned at the ceiling. He wiggled his body slightly in the familiar bed under the familiar covers, and looked around at his familiar desk, computer, picture frames, posters and CD stacks. Everything was the same. He was in his bedroom in the apartment he shared with Rhett and Gregg, just waking up on a formulaic, uninspired Monday morning.

So what exactly was missing?

He huffed an exasperated sigh and detangled himself from the sheets. His feet landed on the familiarly speckled carpet, and he quickly pulled on his briefs and sweatpants. Same things he pulled off of himself last night. He thought briefly about how he watched TV with his roommates over the noise of crunching Doritos, getting bored halfway through the reality show and dodging into his room to play video games, yawning, filling his mug with water, brushing his teeth and pulling those exact pieces of clothing off of himself before tucking in. But somehow the events seemed at once too clear and too vague, like a long list of bullet points he had memorized. A series of matter-of-facts, with the correct chronology, correct location and correct characters. But it was also a list pulled out of a larger context, isolated from a deeper meaning. It felt like he had watched a documentary, _The Life of Link Neal in the Slow Summer Between NC State and IBM_ , and correctly recited the major plot points to a friend.

He stared into the bathroom mirror and scraped at his teeth with his new toothbrush. His gaze darted between the reflections of his own eyes, left to right, right to left. If only they weren’t so wide and droopy at the corners, maybe he would have looked manlier. He scratched at his scalp, shaking soft locks of dark brown hair with his fingers, and raked them back in order. _Are the fringes too short and the sides too long?_ _Maybe it’s time for a change_ , he thought. Rinse, spit, watch a needle thin snake of red craw down the drain. Always happens on new-toothbrush day. He wiped his lips dry with the back of his hand and walked out.

The apartment door opened just as Link returned to the living room. Rhett walked in with a plastic bag swinging on his elbow.

“I see you’ve risen and shined.” Said the smirky radio voice. _How does he always sound so good?_ Link thought. _I swear the guy could read through a phonebook and win a fucking Grammy._

“Yeah Rhett, I’m minty fresh and ready to take over the world again. The same thing we do every night, Pinky.” He drew up one corner of his mouth and watched his roommate walk towards him with a bright-eyed smile.

_Roommate? No._ Boyfriend _._

“I got us breakfast burritos.” Rhett said, dropping the plastic bag on the coffee table on his way to Link. He stopped in front of his best friend’s toes, took both of his wrists into his hands, and smiled down at the clear blue eyes.

_I should kiss him._ Link realized.

_Should?_

A frown fleeted past his brow before he pressed his lips to his boyfriend’s. Those lips felt great. Warm, soft, sexy and familiar, just like the tip of the soft tongue tracing his lower lip. _French it is._

He pulled back and his smile was uncertain. Surely this was what he did everyday. Wake up, get ready, kiss his _boyfriend_.

Then why did he have to realize that he should? Why did he have to make a conscious decision to do it? He thinks like an engineer, sure. Every action is an optimized decision, even the procedural usage of a towel after a shower. But a kiss? A kiss should be the product of impulse, passion, desire and guilty pleasure of the opposite side of the brain. A habitual kiss would be even more so. It would be a familiar want, a couldn’t-help-it, a gesture as irrationally irresistible as picking at the chapped skin on the corner of a finger nail. It should not be we-go-together-hence-I-kiss-him.

So why was it one of those decisions that just felt a little _off_? And was that nervousness in those big hazel eyes?

“Want coffee?” The skinny giant sounded excited to the point of giddy.

“ _You_ are making coffee for _me_? What are you, possessed by a teddy bear?” Link smirked. He was always the one who made coffee, that much he knew.

“Yeah, I’m _that_ nice. You’re just now realizing it?” Ok, typical retort. The pause before the delivery might have been a little longer than usual, if anything.

“Gregg took his bike out already?” Link’s eyes landed on the empty corner behind the dingy couch covered in gaudy yellow flowers, and thought it unusual for the overnight video game junkie who normally woke up and went on bike rides in the afternoons.

“Link, he moved out last week. Wow, you really need your coffee, huh?” Rhett abruptly turned away in the middle of that sentence and noisily collected water and fumbled through cabinets.

Last week, that’s right. The list of bullet points needed a correction. So last night, that was…right. That was just him and Rhett, snuggling on the couch and watching reality TV. And then…slept in separate beds? No fumbling hands traveling lower and lower? No lip biting and eyelashes flicking? No grabbing, giggling and straddling?

“So last night, we didn’t…”

“Nah. The stupid TV show kinda ruined the mood.” Rhett said with his back to him. _Is that so?_ Link caught himself suspecting. Is it so easy to keep two twenty-two year old, hormone crazed young lovers off of each other?

_Lovers_. Definitely lovers. So why live with a third roommate for so long? Financial reasons, the only thing that would explain it. But why still stay in separate bedrooms? And if Gregg was cool with them going together in the first place, wouldn’t he be cool with the two lovebirds sharing a room, and him occupying a separate one? Why three rooms to begin with?

And when did his life become a story with unresolved internal logic issues?

What if there was more than just this day being a little off? Link found himself giving in to his latent anxiety, and becoming unnervingly confused. He looked up with down-turned lips and knotted eyebrows, only to see Rhett’s sunny smile and his large hands holding out a steaming mug of coffee.

“Thanks, teddy bear.”

“My pleasure.” Rhett said, simply and softly, his voice almost one of those sweet-nothing whispers coming out of a rom-com. Link searched through his color-changing eyes, and was momentarily entranced by the smoldering tenderness pouring at him. Did he always look at him this way? Well, maybe not every single second but…often enough, right? They were _lovers_.

“So…did Gregg finally have enough of our bedroom noises or something?” He sipped at his coffee and prodded with a casual tone. But immediately following the sound of the last syllable, Link realized that he had no way to answer the question himself. It was as if he browsed through his day-planner looking for an entry in his own handwriting concerning the noise level of their love-making, but could not for the life of him find any.

Either this Monday was some absurd, surreal fiction, or he was slowly but surely losing his mind.

Rhett snorted a nervous chuckle. “I don’t know about that, his gaming headphones seem pretty hefty. He was vague about it but I think he just moved back home to save money. With his deferred graduation and all, probably not gonna find a cushy job too soon.”

Right, right, makes perfect sense. But why was Link not part of the why-are-you-moving-out discussion? Surely Rhett spent more time gaming with him while Link was studying in the library, but the three of them were all very close friends. Why would Link even have to ask why he moved out? He should have known already.

Mondays. Damn the everything-feels-a-little-off Mondays.

But then again, thank _God_ for breakfast burritos.


	2. Chapter 2

Rhett slouched against his closed bedroom door and panted breathlessly. That was too close. _Too. Fucking. Close._

If he’s going to keep his secret, he has got to be more careful.

Rhett calmed his lungs and sank into his swivel chair. He pulled open the top left drawer on his desk and carefully picked up a vintage fountain pen. It was silver and sleek, with an oddly satisfying weight that most other popular writing tools hanging in plastic drugstore packages could not offer. The heftiness came partly from the metal tubing, partly from the abundant liquid ink inside. As an avid writer, Rhett loved the idea of working with ink in a very literal sense. The process of twisting open the pen, dipping it into the glass well and squeezing the inner rubber tube until it filled up was a time-consuming fuss to most of his peers; but for him, it was a ritualistic preparation that marked both previous achievements and future possibilities. Even the necessity to drive across town to the only art supply store that still sold fountain pen ink did not discourage him. He did not need to make the trip often, it had turned out, because the formidable power of the pen had determined that he could only write few choice words with it.

Rhett could still remember the inexplicable experience surrounding the acquisition of this pen. He remembered standing outside that quaint vintage shop in Amsterdam—the last stop during his brief excursion in Europe, and staring at the coach lamp hanging above a glass door framed by battered and peeled wood and scribed with golden letters in a strange language. He had never felt so intensely pulled by an unyielding force towards a physical location, save for, perhaps, Link’s lips. But by a cursive glance into the vitrine he knew the attraction was not from the antique lamp shaded by a collage of mother-of-pearl pieces, or the embossed brass cuff links sitting in one of those leather wrapped boxes lined with cushiony red velvet. It came from deeper inside the store. So he pushed open the squeaky glass door, setting off the old-fashioned brass bell hanging above the entrance. He gave a courteous nod to the owner dressed in a white linen shirt, a plaid vest and a silver tweed driving cap. He navigated the store with hurried but self-assured steps, as if he knew the floor plan by heart. He turned and glided through stuffed shelves and did not stop until he found the silver pen, _his_ silver pen, sitting in a modest but well-made wooden case with maroon lining. If was as if no thought had passed through his mind before he took it over to the counter to make payment. He knew he needed it.

“Hi. How much for this?”

The Dutchman in a silver tweed driving cap looked up as if Rhett had pointed a gun to his head.

“My friend, is this what you truly want?” He asked with a thick accent and horrified light blue eyes.

“Um…yeah. It’s a cool pen, I mean, if I can afford it.” The young traveler smiled with a nonchalant shrug.

“My friend, I’m afraid the price that comes with this is not merely material.”

Rhett lifted a dark, inquisitive eyebrow.

“This pen belonged to my grandfather. He loved to tell stories, like all old men do, perhaps. But he insisted that this was acquired from the descendants of a great writer with a name you may know of. Jules Verne.”

“Oh. I know _Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea_. I read part of it, didn’t finish.” Rhett flashed another smile, feeling his heart sink at the prospect of not being able to afford the sleek silver pen after all.

“Yes, that’s one of the great examples of the power of his writing. Many have said that Jules Verne’s pen had the power to create reality. Indeed, the concept of submarine that appeared in that book has come true. He wrote about glass skyscrapers, cars and high speed trains in the nineteenth century, and they all became the reality we live today.” The Dutch voice was eager but still as somber as his eyes. Rhett simply nodded respectfully.

“I can tell from your voice that you’ve travelled from afar, my friend. I’m sure you’ve known of inexplicable things in life, you’ve heard or read about them. You might have known of events that have no explanation in nature or science, and coincidences so bizarre that they defy all reason. And this pen might add to the shock and amazement you have encountered in your life. Like I said before, critics and scholars have said that Verne’s pen had the power to create reality, but they do not know that this could be true in a very literal sense. What this pen could do might make you question everything you know, for it will seek out the true wish of your heart, and realize it when it is written.”

Rhett’s critical mind immediately leapt to the impossibility of the Dutchman’s statements. As an engineer in training, he had established carefully calculated confines in his mind as to what was possible. A wish-fulfilling, reality-altering pen lay miles beyond the furthest edge of likelihood. However, there was something about the frank ardor in his tone, something about the burning ache in his eyes, and something about the dimly lit space filled with countless artifacts, each with its own history of joy, conflict, goodwill and malice. There was something about Europe, maybe, that simply made him keep his mind open and his skepticism temporarily stowed away.

“I know this to be true, my foreign friend, because I have had a taste of the pen’s power, and it had ruined me. For that reason I am happy for it to leave my possession, and I am willing to give it to you without charge, because I know that you will take it across the ocean, and it would be a blessing for me to never see it again. But before I let you have this, tell me one thing. Have you known pain?”

“Um…physically, sure.” Rhett was getting overwhelmed by the gravity of the conversation with this complete stranger who spoke of things and possibilities beyond his wildest imagination, who was now offering these things and possibilities to him without asking for a cent in return, all the while pressing him with deep questions that were vaguely philosophical and threatened to probe too far into his psyche.

“You are young, and that is a fortune and a privilege. I do not believe it possible that life has laden you with the kind of pain that I have known. But remember this, my young friend, that pain is a formidable power. The pain from being far away from the true wish of your heart will consume your life. So I caution you: if you know this pain or ever come to know of it in the future, do _not_ give in. Whatever your heart truly wishes for, pursue it with honesty. Use this pen to write, but write mundane things of the past and do not invoke its power to create a different reality of the present and the future. Altering reality with words will only bring more pain than you have ever known.”

And with those words the Dutchman fell completely silent and motionless. The young traveler was at a complete loss for words. He gingerly picked up the wooden case containing the dire writing instrument, and tentatively looked back at the owner. His gaze was responded by nothing but a light nod. It was as if the exotic man in anachronistic dress was an automaton installed to deliver that exact speech to Rhett, and then power down as soon as it was finished. The tall young man gave a polite smile without knowing for sure if it was even received, and hurried out of the most peculiar stop in all his travels.

But as more time passed since he left the enchanting European continent and returned to his home in the southern United States, the possibility that he possessed something potentially magical seemed to fade with staggering speed. The more he thought about it, the more the Dutchman’s tale seemed like a superstitious mis-attribution of some unfortunate coincidence, and the more his silver pen seemed like nothing but a vintage oddity that he could wield with secret hubris. He remembered practically bursting with excitement the first time he filled the pen with ink and gripping it tightly, hovering over the pristine page of a new, sky-blue notebook he specifically bought just to write with his new literary equipment. It felt celebratory but also overtly ceremonial, as if an audience of hundred were holding their crystal champagne flutes mid-air, waiting for his first word to initiate them on a journey of enlightenment. The more time he spent hovering over the page, the more his mind became deeply entrenched in the memory of the curious provenance of this pen. The inevitable comparison with the original owner of the instrument quickly took away all his confidence in his own literary prowess. He had huffed a petulant sigh, replaced the cap and stashed the pen and the notebook back in his drawer with a loud slam.

But he had not forgotten the exchange at the most bizarre shop he had ever been to. _Have you known pain,_ the Dutchman had asked, and wasn’t _that_ just the greatest question.

He might have been at least twenty years younger than the mysterious man wearing a frickin driving cap made of silver frickin tweed, but he too, had known pain of the most formidable kind—the pain of being far away from the true wish of his heart. And the pain eventually became so overwhelming that at 5 am that morning, against all dire warnings of the Dutchman, he had given in and invoked the power of the pen.

A soft knock on the door pulled Rhett out of his reminisce. He frantically stuffed the pen into the sky-blue notebook laying on the corner of his desk and yelled, “it’s open!”

The exquisite face with soft wavy hair and big blue eyes peeked in.

“I’m gonna go to the gym. Wanna come?”

“Nah, I worked out yesterday. You don’t want a big Shahbaz standing around half-assing free weights and staring at your butt.”

Link raised his long eyebrows alternately. “Whatever strikes your fancy, my dear.” He turned and walked towards the apartment door.

_Oh gosh, did he just say that?_ Those words in that buttery smooth voice sent Rhett’s heart into an intoxicated flutter. He sprang from his chair and dashed behind the true wish of his heart.

“Wait!” He said, catching up behind Link. The brunet turned around and tilted his head to the side.

“Kiss me again?”

With a confused frown and a bemused smirk, Link brought his lips up to the tall blond once again. It was a sweet and soft kiss, devoid of frantic trepidation of unfamiliar intimacy, but filled with practiced harmony and lasting adoration. And that kiss was what Rhett would think about with wide-eyed amazement after Link walked away with a dazzling twirl.

He needed that kiss. After all, it’s been almost ten years.

Rhett sank back into the swiveling chair in his bedroom and opened the sky-blue notebook reserved specifically for his—well, let’s face it—magic pen. He ran his fingers over the inky blue words he had written at 5 am that morning, and savored the lingering warmth on his lips.


	3. Chapter 3

Link listened to his breathing synching up to the movements of his legs on the exercise bike, and let his mind wander.

The 10 o’clock sunlight streaked through the high windows and cast bright white squares on the floor. Link thought of how the same sunlight had hit Rhett’s hair at just the right angle that morning, bringing out the threads of gold amidst his short curls. His mind traced his boyfriend’s perfectly arched eyebrows, his powerful, possessive gaze that has so often rendered him breathless, his angular nose, his heart shaped lips adorned by a tiny mole, the cluster of dark hair running from under his plump bottom lip down his sharp jaw…

_His body_.

Now there’s a thought that was familiar to the point of comforting. Many times when a repetitive, mindless task like paddling an exercise bike became an excuse for casual meditation, Rhett’s body was almost an inevitable destination for Link’s wandering mind. Especially when he was alone, he could indulge in the guilty pleasure that he otherwise kept hidden from the judgmental world. He would retrace the shadow under Rhett’s collarbones, the smooth outline of his prominent pectorals, and the fluid movements of his long limbs. Rhett’s body would become his mind map. He would trace those impossibly long legs up and down and back up again. He would mentally lick that soft groove that went all the way down the center of his back and disappeared into his waistband.

Wait, _disappeared_?

Link’s left foot slipped off the paddle and his heart skipped a momentarily panicked beat. He did not know which happened first, losing his footing or panicking about the fact that he could not picture his boyfriend in full nudity.

Naturally, they have seen each other in nothing but underwear plenty of times. Needless to say that having been friends since first grade, all the sleepovers, swims, gym changing and communal showers left little to the imagination. But _something_ was still left unseen, and Link couldn’t deny that he had imagined that _something_ many times. He simply could not believe that despite the new-found intimate layer of their fifteen-year friendship, he still has yet to see that _something_.

Maybe he didn’t have enough focus to stay on the exercise bike. It has been more than twenty minutes anyway, his body was radiating heat and his muscles were eager and ready, so he dipped his left foot onto the floor, swung his right leg off the bike and strolled towards the free weights. He picked up a 50lb dumb bell in each hand, hitched them on his shoulders, and focused on deep squats.

“Don’t cheat the squeeze!”

Link jumped slightly at the cheery, thickly-accented exclaim coming from behind him. He turned around to see his friend from film club, the Norwegian exchange student Marius who stood six-foot tall and sported platinum blond hair that flowed past the nape of his neck. Marius greeted Link’s surprised expression with a sharp whistle and a shameless ogle at his bottom.

“Chill it, Mario.” Link responded with a playful frown and the popular choice for a friendly nickname that had been thrown around since the good looking Nordic joined the NC State community. A year has passed since they met, but it seemed to Link that the flamboyant Viking still hasn’t grasped that he was not in Europe anymore. It still seemed to escape him that in the southern United States, one does not simply hit on dudes at the gym when one is also a dude.

“Hey, just letting a bro know he looks good!” Marius threw his palms up to either side of his chest and pouted naively. Link breathed an amused chuckle. “You still helping me out at four, bro?”

“Sure thing, dude. Are you wrapping today?”

“Yah, just redoing two scenes that didn’t work and then the whole thing’s ready for the chopping block.” Marius made an exaggerated chopping motion with his hands.

“I’m happy for you dude. It was an amazing project.”

“Couldn’t have done it without you Link, you’re in the credits.” Marius gave Link a lopsided thumbs up and sauntered out of the gym.

When Link finally finished his lunges and curls he was dripping with sweat. He felt a subtle change in the air flow around his moistened body, and turned his head to see the gym door opening. Had he not already set the weights down on the rack, he would have dropped both of them on his feet.

Among the three chatty, giggly girls that walked in was a tall blonde with straight, shoulder-length hair, big smiley eyes and wide full lips.

Link has never been hit harder by a sudden crashing feeling of recognition. The heat of his own body was almost unbearable, but every muscle in his body thoroughly froze as if he was standing stark naked in knee-deep snow.

The three girls started noticing the dripping young man’s open-mouthed, wide-eyed stare. The statuesque blonde responded with a puzzled smile while her friends giggled and prodded at her arms. Link blushed a fierce red and dodged around the corner. He stumbled to a seat on the weight bench and struggled to regain his breaths.

_I know her…I know her…I know her…_

Link searched through his entire memory looking for instances where he had met the young blonde woman, but could not find any. But despite his best rational deduction of the impossibility of knowing someone he had never met, the vague but palpable impression of familiarity would not dissipate. He screamed at his own mind to stop hallucinating, but his mind screamed back that the sense of recognition was definitely real.

_K…k…ch…_

_**CHRISTY**_.

The name spelled itself out in the darkest, boldest form and chased all other thoughts out of his mind. Link heard his own voice screaming the name into his ears, again and again. Pain shot through his temples like a hollow point bullet. He let out a loud groan and clasped his head with his hands.

“Excuse me, are you ok?”

Link looked up and saw the statuesque blonde standing in front of him with a concerned look. Before he knew it, as if someone had plugged an emergency socket with a neutralization key, the pain and the screaming stopped.

“Uh…I’m fine, thank you. This may sound crazy but…is your name Christy?” Of course, Link already knew the answer, but the inexplicable certainty of being confirmed also terrified him.

“Yup, that’s me. I’m sorry but I couldn’t remember your name.” Christy wrung her hands in front of her with a warm, demure smile.

“Oh don’t worry about it, I’m Link.” He stood up, clumsily wiped his sweaty palm on his shorts and held it out towards the young lady.

As soon as he touched her skin, Link felt as if his mind came entirely undone. He felt uprooted from reality, from the life that he was evidently living, and transplanted into a different experience, a different life lived by his exact self. But the out-of-body experience was somehow superior to reality, because it seemed that he had been searching for that experience, that alternate life; because it was more _right_ and more real than the reality that he was standing in. It was as if he had spent years and years looking for a forgotten truth scribbled on a crumpled and faded page, and found it right in the palm of his hand.

It was a terrifying realization, but he realized that he had found what had been out of place ever since he opened his eyes that morning, the missing piece of this surreal, absurd Monday. It’s _her_.

Out of the crashing waves of longing, reunion and euphoria rose an overwhelming urge to kiss her.

Link gasped and released Christy’s hand, and the crashing waves were gone.

“I’m…sorry I’m not quite myself today. Nice meeting you.” Link rushed out his panicked words and ran out of the gym.

He showered and changed in a daze, suppressing the urge to rush out and chase after the blonde that he evidently knew but did not know. He was at war with his own mind all the way back to the apartment. When he unlocked and stepped through the door, it was exactly noon.

“Rhett? I’m back!” He called out absent-mindedly, and received no response. He went over to his boyfriend’s bedroom door, gently knocked, but silence persisted. He twisted the handle and felt an unyielding stop. As if his day could get any stranger than fiction, his best friend of fifteen years, his blood brother with whom he was now on kissing terms, had locked his bedroom door on him.

Link tossed his gym bag in the middle of the living room and sank into the gaudy yellow couch. For the next ten minutes, he sat in motionless confusion, ignoring the prickly discomfort from his stubbly chin digging into his palms. When his mind finally gave up on its futile search for answers and left him feeling utterly without resource, he picked up his phone.

“Hey buddy!” Rhett’s voice was unreasonably giddy again.

“Hey Rhett. Uh…where are you?”

“Just out doing some shopping. What’s up?”

_Good question._ “Nothing much. Just uh…just wondering. I’m…feeling kinda _off_ I guess.”

A strangely long pause.

“That’s every Monday for me, brother.” Rhett’s voice was still cheery.

“Yeah…I don’t exactly thrive on Mondays either. Anyways, did I mention I was gonna help Mario with his short film at four?”

“Yep, you did.”

“So I’m gonna be leaving at three for that. Are you coming home for lunch?”

“Can’t. My dad volunteered me to help out Campbell’s admissions log some data. Won’t be home till four.”

“Oh, ok.” Link picked at a loose thread on his jeans that was slowly tearing into a hole.

“But I’m making dinner! When do you get back? Seven?”

“Sure. Definitely before seven thirty. What’s the occasion, Shahbaz?”

“Oh, I don’t know, International Be Nice to Your Boyfriend Day?”

“Ah. Well if it’s international, I better observe it then. You look very nice my dear, those earrings really compliment your shoes.”

Link smiled at the trill of laughter he had elicited from his best friend. Rhett started to say something, but broke out laughing again.

“Have fun filming, maestro. See you at seven-ish.” Rhett finally managed to say.

“Later.”


	4. Chapter 4

Rhett clicked off his phone and gently set it down next to his coffee on the green patio table. Of course there was no data logging for the admissions office. He simply could not ruin the surprise. Tonight was, by all intents and purposes, their first date. Rhett had gone over the game plan many times in his mind. By exactly 2:30pm, he would leave the coffee shop to buy ingredients for lasagna and a bottle of red wine. By 3:30 he would be at the flower shop selecting a moderately romantic arrangement of roses and lilies sprinkled with forget-me-nots. By 4pm he would be back at the apartment, transplanting the bouquet in fresh water and getting ready to follow the step by step instruction from the recipe he had printed out.

Quite frankly speaking, Rhett was surprised by his own methodical composure on such a tumultuous day. When he had woken up at 4 am with dried tears crusted at the corners of his eyes, he hardly expected to be prepping a romantic dinner less than 12 hours later. When he had woken up at 4 am, he had lost track of time, staring at the first entry in his sky blue notebook.

“He must have been thirteen and it must have been Amber Stevenson.”

It was the answer Link gave at a party when asked if they knew who and when their best friend’s first kiss was. Those were the first words on the first page, the words that Rhett would never forget, possibly the words that still hurt him most. And for that reason the sentence was thoroughly slashed through with angry lines going left and right and up and down.

“For the record I was fourteen.” He had corrected out loud, at the party where those words were spoken. But that was not the correction he should have made or wanted to make. He was fourteen when he kissed _her_ , but he was thirteen when he kissed _him_.

The circumstances surrounding their shared first kiss were anything but ceremonial. There was no bottle, no dare, no if-you-are-gonna-kiss-a-girl-why-not-practice-with-me. There was simply summer sunshine on their favorite cow pasture, and two thirteen year old boys laying side by side who had simultaneously turned to each other. Desire was communicated between their eyes, not their lips. And when the two pair of lips met softly, the two pairs of eyes both fluttered close. Warmth lingered from sunshine on their eyelids and their hands between each other’s shoulder blades. When they parted, no one spoke either.

And they never did speak of it. When a thirteen year old boy inexplicably kisses another thirteen year old boy who also grew up in a small southern town named after a creek, they don’t say “let’s talk about that.” They don’t hold each other’s hands and gaze softly into each other’s eyes and ponder upon future affections to come. They sit up in a daze, scramble onto their feet with an embarrassed blush, and rush back to their homes. They would only think about one word: shouldn’t.

In fact not only did they avoid speaking of the “incident”, they avoided speaking all together—until Link had found another girlfriend. But they did not touch each other until rumor reached Link at the deep corner of the library that Rhett was “going” with a girl named Amber. That afternoon when Link caught up with him by the lockers and finally put his palm on his best friend’s shoulder, Rhett felt the sting of tears.

So for the next ten years, when asked “who was your first kiss” or “who was his first kiss”, the answer had always been “Amber Stevenson”. Of course a boy’s name would not be the right answer to that question, especially not when that boy’s name was also the name of a best friend and blood brother. A boy’s name was destined to be discreetly pushed aside like a botched first attempt at a ground-breaking experiment. It was bad data, an extreme outlier, a pesky incorrect number that would screw up the tidy statistics and prevent the researchers from ever getting published and gaining prestige. A boy’s name had to be the redacted line on a nondescript page stashed in an unmarked folder, all for the glorious name of progress. A boy’s name had to be that clichéd secret taken to the grave.

So Rhett did exactly what Link had done: stash the bad data away and welcome glorious progress in a definitively heterosexual stride. He approached girls with the laser-beam focus of a researcher, devoting his time and attention to in-depth discussions about them, representing himself as one obsessed with the fair sex. But no matter how hard he tried or made an exemplary demonstration of trying, he simply could not stop _noticing_ his best friend.

It always started with a scientific prediction of when and where he would see Link for the first time on any given day. And when the subject of his observation appeared, no matter how he had looked, that image would always strike Rhett as utterly brilliant. It would become an illusory intrusive thought that Rhett welcomed throughout the day. How Link looked with the first hint of a goatee, how Link looked with bleached hair, how Link looked in every single shade of blue. Before he would even admit it, his best friend had become his biggest obsession—the only one maddening enough to make him scream into his pillow, punch through his dry wall and hurl a tube of deodorant that would explode against his bedroom door, simply over insinuations of a nonexistent crush that who else but Link had fabricated. On some level, the hormone propelled teen was simply angry at the baby-faced brunet’s total oblivion to what Rhett thought he had made clear with his eyes—that if anyone had the power to consume his teenage heart with the angst of a white-hot blinding crush, it was his dark-haired, blue-eyed angel of a best friend.

But just like every hormone propelled teen, Rhett would be held back from confession by pride, trepidation and the spotlight judgment from the rest of the small southern town that threatened to set him ablaze. Nevertheless, just like every hormone propelled teen, he would also attribute hidden meaning to every half-hearted word and over-analyze every sideways glance. He would take vigilant notice to the subtle softening in Link’s tone when they spoke alone, and the palpable warmth in Link’s smile when they made plans of an exclusively brotherly weekend. Worse still, from time to time when he made a particularly strong social impression of involvement with the fair sex, he would see jealousy glare at him, crystal clear and icy blue. As a result, hope hatched and grew like a snake slithering through the walls. In one instance it would disappear through an invisible crack when he watched Link’s lips meet a pair that wasn’t his own. But in the very next day, when he felt his blood brother offer him a lingering hug and deeply inhale against his chest, he would look past Link’s shapely shoulders and see the snake named Hope stare at him with calculating eyes and a triumphant hiss.

When they embarked on their shared collegial endeavor, Rhett brought Hope the Metaphorical Snake with him to their shared dorm room. Bunking with Link was nothing short of a delicious poison. The carefree brunet would be in a perpetual state of semi-undress, pulling his shirt off of his inverted-pyramid physique the first chance he got. Rhett made an effort to not stare, of course, he gave it the contrived “old college try”. But good lord how that smooth, tanned skin glowed from the inside out. And without fail, the glowing tan, among many other things, had deeply engrained itself as an integral part of Rhett’s “shower thoughts”.

Rhett could still recall the seemingly mundane instance where he was showing Link something on his computer screen. What exactly, he had long forgotten; because all that mattered about that experience was that the perpetually shirtless Link had one hand propped on his desk and the other hand gripping the back of his chair, and when he leaned in, his toned chest and chocolate hued areola was exactly two inches from Rhett’s suddenly parched lips. The seconds seemed to drag on forever while he stole repeated glances towards Link’s body, and repeatedly screaming at himself to not lunge at him with open arms and a greedy tongue. Hope the Metaphorical Snake watched from the corner, and later whispered to him that Link had left him a lingering gaze with a lovely blush and an audible gulp.

But Rhett and his snake had grown increasingly cautious and disheartened while a statuesque blonde girl has been making more frequent and regular guest appearances in Link’s life. Rhett felt as if his image was progressively shrinking as the blonde solidified her place day by day next to his best friend, coming into her element as a heroine of sorts. And fast forwarding to last night, at exactly 8pm Eastern Time, the metaphorical snake that Rhett had grown to know and love was violently murdered by three simple words.

“I’m gonna propose.”

Rhett dubbed his flowing tears with a rushed “I’m happy for you, brother”, and sought refuge in his bedroom. Hope had been stabbed while fearfully coiling around his heart, and its death thrashes tore him to bits from the inside out. Somewhere in between his strangled sobs and exhaustion naps, desperation won over all other residents of his rational mind. He woke up at 4am with tears crusted at the corners of his eyes and stared at the violently erased reminisce of the hurtful lie about their first kiss. Over the course of a despaired hour, his resolve hardened to the favorite cliché of gut-wrenching love stories: _something has got to give_.

But what, exactly?

Rhett pulled out his silver pen and felt like a deranged sniper with the proverbial carte blanche. He calibrated his aim by something of less import than the painful conundrum at hand, and wrote, “Gregg had moved out last week.”

When the period mark hit the page, Rhett was disappointed. There had been no cracking thunder or blinding lightening, no violent gusts of wind rustling through piles of loose papers, not even a subtle wavering in the air around him. If anything, the space had gone quieter. Rhett capped his pen and bounced it in his palm for quite a few minutes before eventually taking a deep breath and twisting open the handle on his door.

The first thing he saw was that Gregg’s bike was gone.

With shock and amazement he rushed into the kitchen, flinging open cabinets and fridge doors, and then lunged into a whirlwind, examining every enclosed space of their living room. Finally he pulled open the door that previously lead to Gregg’s bedroom. What had greeted him were four empty walls.

The pen worked.

When the shock and awe subsided, Rhett was back at his desk. Determined to instill change but fearful of erasing too much and not recreating enough, Rhett decided to rewrite only one reality.

“Link, the only one that I have ever truly loved, has always been the beautiful and amazing person that he is now. There is only one thing different about his life: he had never met a woman named Christy. He is with me like he has always been, like a brother and a best friend. But now more than ever before, he shares my love.”

The beep of Rhett’s watch reminded him of the arrival of 2:30 pm. He pressed his palms into the patio table, rose out of his seat outside the coffee shop, and sauntered into the afternoon sunlight like a cowboy who had just won a quick draw.

At least at 2:30 pm, Rhett still believed that tonight was going to be the best night of his life.


	5. Chapter 5

Four o’clock came and passed, and the filming process was completed without a glitch. The two cinematographers soon found themselves sitting in a dingy college bar at the edge of the campus.

“Can I ask you something, Mario?” Link slouched with one elbow propped on the back of his seat and the other hand extended onto the cracked wooden counter, lightly drumming the surface with his fingernails.

“Of course, Link.”

“Have you had…one of those days that just…doesn’t make sense?”

“Like a futile search for meaning in life? That’s every day, my friend.”

“No, dude, that’s _way_ too deep and depressing. I mean like…littler things. Like waking up and feeling like something’s missing for some reason, or not remembering things that you ought to know.”

Marius folded his arms and leaned further to the side to scrutinize the brunet’s face. “Well you’re too young for Alzheimer’s, so…maybe you just, like you Americans say, woke up on the wrong side of the bed?”

“That’s just an empty expression though. What does that even mean?”

“You’re the American, you tell me.”

Link hesitated and took a sip of his beer. “It’s a lazy expression. You just say that when you don’t really want to figure out why you’re feeling _off_.”

“See that’s just the thing. What do you mean by ‘off’, exactly? Is it a physical lack of energy? Is it a mental confusion? A general existential state of abnormality?”

“Well I can tell you it’s not physical, _doctor_.” Link accentuated his sarcasm with a theatrical wave of his hands.

“So are you feeling confused? Abnormal?”

“Hmm. Well first of all normalcy is a relative concept. Everyone is at least abnormal in some respect to some degree, I think we’ve had _that_ conversation before. That being said, in terms of confusion, I’m not confused generally, I don’t think. Just with one or two things today.”

“Like what?”

“Like…ok, let me ask you this first. Have you ever known someone for so long that everything you do with them is habitual?”

“My parents, probably. Can’t say for anyone else.”

“Oh. Um…ok. Let me rephrase. Have you ever felt like you know for sure that you’re _with_ somebody, but at the same time kinda…I don’t know, feel like you’re not used to it?”

”Like a new relationship, sure.”

“Well, no. Like a relationship you’ve been in for a really long time, but suddenly something’s different.”

“Different better or different worse?”

Link contemplated the question and felt his breaths quicken just from thinking about the way Rhett had looked at him that morning. He realized that he had seen the ghost of that look many times since that sunny afternoon in the cow pasture, but never dreamed to define it as what he had hoped it to be—what he never really dared to hope for. Not to mention their kiss. _Kisses_. Link felt like he was openly and rightfully enjoying a drug that was offered to him in a single drop ten years ago, and had been deprived from him ever since.

“Better. Definitely better.”

“So you feel not used to it because it’s too good to be true?”

Link stared at his European friend and felt the kind of rushing relief from being offered an answer to a puzzle that had clouded his mind for years. “Huh. Wow. I guess it is.”

“But is it too good in a way that…freaks you out?”

_Is it?_ Link hesitated and carefully evaluated his feelings. “No. This is what I want. I think I’ve wanted this for a long time but I just…got too used to telling myself that I shouldn’t.”

Marius stared at him with an incredulous frown. “Now _I’m_ confused, bro. So you’ve been with this person for a long time, things suddenly took a turn for the better, and you know you’ve wanted it to be this way but have been telling yourself that you shouldn’t want it? What? Who is this?”

Link carefully looked around him. The bar seemed deserted save for a few scattered strangers, since most of its usual collegiate patrons were on their summer vacation. At least no one he knew was present. The bartender had gone into the back of the establishment a few minutes earlier, so currently no one was within earshot of them.

“Rhett.” He said quietly regardless of the lack of audience.

“Whoa whoa whoa, what? Rhett, like your best friend?”

“We’re more than _that_ now, I guess.”

Marius raised his eyebrows so high it turned his forehead into a musical staff. He stared at Link for a long moment, and slowly shook his head.

“What?” The brunet frowned.

“Bro, how long have you two known each other?”

“Fifteen years.”

“Did you even hear your answer? It doesn’t take fifteen years to figure out if you wanna _hit_ that, bro.”

“Oh come on, it’s not like that.”

“Like what, then? When you say you’re more than friends, does it not mean sex?”

Link groaned and pinched at his nose bridge. He stared at the condensation ring slowly forming at the base of his beer glass, and let out a resigned sigh. “I don’t think we’ve done it.”

“You don’t _think_? Dude, how can you not know for sure whether you’ve had sex with him? You either did or didn’t!”

“Keep it down!” Link hissed under his breath, knowing very well that the mere presence of a flamboyantly open-minded European did not change his surroundings or the judgments that came with it. “So we didn’t, so what?”

Marius snickered and shook his head again. “Fifteen years. Wow. And I’m assuming the two of you spent puberty _together_?”

“Well, we dated girls.”

“So when did you figure out that what you really wanted was _him_?”

Link sighed and sank his chin into his hands. “I guess…when we kissed at thirteen.”

Marius stared at the brunet with cartoonish eyes. “How can you know you want him for ten years and not just…make sure you _have_ him? And why did _he_ not do anything?”

Link shook his head with a long sigh. “I don’t know for sure. We never talked about this. And don’t say fifteen years again.” He held out a preemptive finger.

The Norwegian echoed his sigh. “I was gonna ask what could have possibly stopped you from talking about something this big for this long but I think I know the answer. You know, Link, sometimes I really don’t understand your culture.”

“Sometimes I don’t either.” Link said with his eyes fixed on the smattering of liquor bottles displayed on the shelves in front him without really seeing any of it. He raised his glass to the blond European, and they both took a long drink.

“Anyway. I don’t wanna whine about this. I’ll talk to Rhett when I get back.”

“As you should, my friend.”

Link nodded and wiped away the wet ring left behind by the repositioned glass.

“You still look…how do you say, troubled?”

Link chuckled. “I’m that easy to read, huh? Well, something really weird happened at the gym right after you left, and I still can’t make sense of it.”

“Lay it on me.”

“So…I ran into someone that I’m sure I’ve never met before, but I _know_ her.”

“Those two sentences don’t make sense together.”

“I know, Mario, I know. I mean, I realized that I know her first, and then tried to remember meeting her but couldn’t.”

“Ok, so you have a lingering impression of her but don’t remember how you met her. That’s easy, drunk one-night stand, bro.”

“Whoa, watch it dude, I don’t do that!”

“Alright, I’m sorry, didn’t mean to offend.” Marius raised his palms in a pacifying gesture. “So what convinces you that you know her then?”

“It’s just this…really strong feeling. Like I knew her name before she told me.”

“Could you have seen her picture somewhere on a bulletin board or something? Performance brochure? Website?”

“No. Oh no. It’s definitely not just a matching face to name thing. It’s a much stronger…impression. Like I know her on a deeper level.”

“Is it possible that the experience involving you meeting her was traumatic somehow so your brain suppressed it?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced anything really traumatic, period.”

“Trauma is a relative concept, my friend. What you tell yourself as not too bad might be so difficult for your subconscious to handle that it keeps it hidden from your memory.”

“Well…that might be true but…completely hidden? Like I don’t remember a single trace of it? I don’t think so dude.”

“Memory is not as reliable as you think. Every time you remember something, your mind colors it with the current experience you are going through while you are remembering it, and the next time you recall, it would become an edit. Your mind is like a film reel that keeps losing frames and adding new ones. Memory is essentially a montage, my friend, and you’re constantly rewriting your own reality.”

Link turned to scrutinize the exotic face, and carefully contemplated his perspective. “Hmm. Ok. Say it is a montage. But when you are putting a montage together, if there is one segment that is so meaningful and significant, that seeing it feels like being punched in the gut, would you leave that out? Would you erase every trace of it and forget it ever existed?”

“That would be a terrible choice in filmmaking.”

“Exactly. Well, the connection I felt when I saw her was _that_ real, it was so strong that it just didn’t make sense for me to not remember.”

“A connection as in attraction?”

“Exponentially deeper than that. Like I’ve lived a version of my life where she was such a big part of it that it was only natural to kiss her, but at the same time I know I couldn’t possibly have lived that.”

Marius stared at Link with confusion and incredulity. “Link?”

“Yeah?”

“How high are you right now?”

“I don’t smoke, dude.”

“But what you’re describing, it’s…”

“I know, I know. It’s total whack.”

The Norwegian leaned back and pursed his lips. “It might not be.”

“How?”

“Do you believe in parallel universes?”

“Not really.”

“Do you realize how ironic it is that there’s at least one alternate universe version of you that believes in it?”

“That would predicate on your assumption being true, sir.”

“Say it is true, then wouldn’t it be possible that what you experienced was an overlapping between parallel universes? There could very well be a version of you out there somewhere that did live a life with her, and the connection between alternate-you and alternate-her was so deep that as soon as you saw her in this universe, that alternate reality just bled through the time-space continuum or whatever, and reflected itself in your mind, maybe?”

Link fell silent for a long minute.

“Marius?”

“Yeah?”

“How high are _you_ right now?”


	6. Chapter 6

When the clock ticked past seven Rhett had his elbows propped up on the dinner table, his fingers laced together and pressed against his lips. The sniper that had come alive inside him at 5 am wielding a mighty silver pen was slowly losing his bravado to fatigue and prolonged introspection. Without a doubt, Link was all he ever wished for, and he would have the treasure trove all to himself very soon. But in order to satisfy his greed, he had forcefully separated his best friend from his fiancée, and virtually erased everything that he had shared with her. A weak voice in his mind mumbled that no one got physically hurt, but on a deeper level, Rhett still felt as guilty as a professional hitman who had broken his code of “no women, no kids.”

So when he got back to the apartment at 4pm, he had to take deep breaths through his nostrils and push them out slowly through puckered lips in order to steady his shaking hands. The flowers went into the vase without incident, but at least three times during the transfer, Rhett almost pulled out his phone to tell Link “we need to talk” with a not-at-all subtle implication of an impending confession.

But the same desperation that had driven him to write the reality-altering words in the first place awoke again and stilled his fidgeting fingers. It reminded him that if he could only obtain the true wish of his heart through a fictional premise, then he would surely lose him if he ever dared tearing the fiction apart. So he swallowed the ethical doubts like a sniper returning from a war zone. In order to move on, he needed to learn to be happy in the embrace of his loved ones, and not look back at the blazing trail of gunfire he had left behind.

But unlike a sniper returning from a war zone, Rhett lacked the training to not look back at the blaze. He paced aimlessly in the kitchen, having taken only one step towards a successful first-date dinner: turning on the oven. When it beeped and flashed impatiently, he realized that he still hasn’t washed the brand new glass baking dish he had purchased for the occasion. He gaped at the crowd of plastic bags on the counter stuffed with unprepared ingredients, and thought for sure that he would have to admit defeat and call for rescue in the form of pizza at some point between 5 and 6 pm.

But he was young, male, college-educated and outstandingly tall. He had a heavy-metal band in his Bill of Bragging Rights and silver studs in his earlobes. Admitting defeat would be the most out-of-character thing he could imagine, even when his life was now operating under a newly fictional premise. So he searched his mind and pulled out his safety card, and took the secret approach that always got him out of the proverbial jam.

_What would Link do?_

Well, Link would carve out the period of time he needed, solve the problem within that time, and relax after it’s done. Link would not worry about forgetting how to read English words, and instead pick up the printed instructions and realize each step with his actions. Link would be anxious from time to time because of how much he cared about what truly mattered to him, but Link would not panic as soon as he had a plan. So the lanky young man with thick eyebrows copied his younger friend’s methodology once again and dove into his culinary venture like it was a math problem.

But of course, being young, male, college-educated and outstandingly tall, Rhett would never admit to his best friend how much he admired him. Especially since it seemed that ever since that kiss almost ten years ago, they had been struggling to restore the fragile balance of their friendship. They molded and chiseled their methods of interaction after a template of “brothers”, and eventually settled into a peculiar system of banters, jabs and casual sarcasm that verged on thinly veiled hostility. But they had no choice but to remain lighthearted, no matter how much they truly admired each other, relied on each other and loved each other. If the glass wall of non-intimacy ever saw a single crack, it would crumble under a flood of powerful sentiments that their small southern town deemed wrongful beyond salvation, and their innocent love would lose its footing and plunge into a lake of fire.

But what about tonight?

Rhett sat at the table, breathing in the heady aroma of garlic, tomatoes and fresh parsley from his culinary accomplishments, and felt suddenly lost. As if he was walking on beach sands in a nostalgic dream, and all of a sudden the ocean boiled over and boulders rose out of water with thundering roars, sieging him with jagged mountainous cliffs and no paths in sight. The old lukewarm façade of their relationship had been torn apart by his silver pen, revealing the naked desire as raw and electrifying as wet skin on live copper wire. So where would he go from here? How would he even _talk_ to his best friend now that he was his lover?

The apartment door opened and all the trepidation in his mind was gone.

Link stood in the doorway with a warm smile. A sheen of sweet summer sweat glistened on his honey toned skin. Rhett leapt from his seat and took the dreamy wish of his heart into his arms. His fingers held onto the slightly moistened fabric clinging to Link’s lower back and his rocky shoulder blades, and his lips found their home on Link’s skin.

The brunet had been turning a myriad of questions and concerns in his mind on the drive home, but as soon as he pressed himself against his best friend’s firm chest, he realized that his anxious thoughts were decidedly trivial. It didn’t matter that he remembered nothing of their third roommate moving out, it didn’t matter that they never had been intimate on a threshold-crossing level, and it didn’t matter that for a brief second during his sweaty exhaustion, he had a bizarre déjà vu with an attractive young blonde woman. For so long he had wanted Rhett in a way that he did not dare admitting to himself, and now he had him.

“Kudos to you for making our bachelor pad smell good for once.”

Rhett smiled to the mischievous wink of those sparkly blue eyes. In an instant he understood. The pen changed everything, but it really changed nothing. They have always loved each other, as long as they have been thinking of each other as best friends, brothers, carefree boys who would have fun at each other’s expense. The humor and the tease was not predicate on a carefully maintained tension. It was how they shared their minds with each other, a mode of communication as unique and intimate as a secret handshake or a system of listening and talking dictated by the height of rocks. It’s their love language. It was and still is a part of who they are.

They scarfed down hurried bites, with Link flashing a spoiled grin every time his eyes landed on the bouquet of flowers. Before long, they were holding hands while Rhett opened his bedroom door, biting his lower lip while excitement sparkled in his eyes.

Link stared at the floor in amazement as a few dozens of flameless tea lights flickered and glowed in the collective shape of an enormous heart.

“Wow.” He mumbled. His blue eyes shimmered with emotions, and his soft pink lips fell open.

“Wow.” He said again. Rhett turned to his best friend with a tender gaze, and gently ran his hand across his broad shoulders.

Link no longer wondered why his best friend had locked his bedroom door earlier that day. He simply wrapped himself around the beautiful young man next to him and leaned in for a deep, passionate kiss.

Rhett flicked his tongue across the prominent tendons on Link’s neck, and slid his hands under the brunet’s powder blue polo. He pushed the fabric all the way up his lean torso, leaving a trail of heat. Link looked deep into his green eyes and raised his arms, surrendering to the taller man’s passion. When his shirt landed on the floor the brunet tugged the bottom of Rhett’s black T-shirt, brought it over his head and behind his neck. He pushed the tube of fabric further down his lover’s back, letting it form a soft constraint against the strong, muscular arms. He held Rhett’s wrists behind his back and mapped the blond’s rock hard pectoral with his lips and the tip of his nose. When he was finally satisfied with his brief indulgence, Link looked into his lover’s eyes with a flick of his long lashes and a lopsided grin. He undid Rhett’s jeans with his dexterous fingers and pushed the stiff fabric down his hips along with the soft cotton boxers. But as soon as he laid eyes on the throbbing erection inches away from his suddenly tentative fingers, his playful eyes grew large as he swallowed hard.

Rhett took in his lover’s hesitation with adoring eyes. He slid out of his shirt tangled around his wrists and caressed the full length of Link’s muscular arms, pulled him in for another kiss, and unfastened his jeans while their lips remained connected. He undressed the body that he only dreamt about having, and took half a step back to drink in the sight of the statuesque young man illuminated by the glowing heart on the floor. The warm, golden light licked at his skin, turning him into a glorious idol in Rhett’s eyes. So the taller man stepped back and worshiped every inch of that glowing skin with his fingers and his lips.

As if Rhett’s kisses unlocked the final barrier of reservation in Link’s mind, the brunet eagerly tugged the blond towards the bed. Rhett let out a breathy chuckle and gently pressed his delicious lover into the mattress. Link’s soft wavy hair fell back onto the pillow in a lovely halo of dark curves. Rhett felt his heart swell in his chest as he studied every detail of his best friend of fifteen years as if he had never seen him. He saw him almost every day, but never in his own bed, with lust in the crystal blue eyes blooming as dark as the night outside his window, and a passionate flush on his cheeks that rivaled the roses he had brought home that afternoon. He marveled at how Link’s soft skin sank and rose under his passionate touch digging into relaxed muscles, at the sandy friction of the dark hair on his arms, his legs, and under his belly button. Everything he had stared at, imagined and dreamed about was all under his fingertips. In an instant, Rhett was simultaneously humbled by amazement and drunk with power.

He pressed his palms on either side of Link’s torso and lowered his body, erasing every inch of empty space between their bare skin. He grazed his lover’s lips with his teeth and his tongue, and swayed his body back and forth against his blood brother’s groin. A hungry moan rose from the lovely brunet under him, and he moved his lips to the hollow of Link’s neck. While his tongue flicked fervidly at his lover’s sweet skin, Link locked his arms behind Rhett’s shoulder blades, and caress the taller man’s muscular calf with the arch of his foot. The blond above him responded with a throaty moan and a wolfish kiss. Link clasped a leg behind his lover’s knees, and flipped both of them onto their sides. Rhett fell on the pillow with a giggle, and raked one hand down Link’s back and caressed his firm bottom. Their keening moans blended into an erotic chorus rippling through the small bedroom, with no audience but the heart-shaped flicker of lights on the floor. Their hands quickly moved towards each other’s demanding hardness. With a synchronized soft moan their lips met and their eyes fluttered close, just like ten years ago in the cow pasture, on that bright and sunny afternoon.

The blond and the brunet gasped in synchrony as the heat of each other’s palm enveloped their throbbing members. Their hands caressed, glided and massaged, gently and tentatively at first, but as their moans rose and fell in tandem, intoxicated smiles bloomed and pearly white teeth sank into soft pink lips. Rhett marveled at how his best friend returned his gaze with inebriated wonderment, and how the mere sight of that delicate face coupled with the unfamiliar caress between his legs was flinging his body into overdrive. He had never heard his best friend make those desperate moans with his buttery smooth voice, or gasp so loudly with an urgency and indulgence that echoed his own and breathe it out in clouds of heat that crashed on his skin. Link whispered his name and pressed his head of soft shiny curls into his chest, and that was enough to send him over the edge.

After the electrifying release, Rhett let go of the tears brimming over his eyelashes.

Link collapsed back onto the pillow and panted at the ceiling, while the sheer intensity of his heartbeats threatened to drive him unconscious at any second. It took him a minute before he noticed that his best friend laying naked next to him had gone tense and silent. He turned his head and saw shiny trails of tears shimmering in the dim, flickering light.

“What’s wrong?” He whispered, raising his fingers to dry his lover’s cheeks.

Rhett shook his head. It would be too desperate to say that they had wasted ten years, that this was the first time that sex had felt _right_ for him, and that he wished he had gathered the courage during any given day in the past to simply lock the dark-hair young man in his arms and not let go until he understood how much he loved him.

And it would be unacceptable for him to confess that the beautiful moment of passion they just shared would never have happened had he not created a lie.

“I’m sorry, I need a minute.” Rhett shuddered through his words, sprang up and fled from his bedroom.

Link sat up in daze and aftershock. He draped his arms around his knees and waited in patient silence. When Rhett still hasn’t returned after quite a few minutes, he swung his legs over the edge of the bed and lowered himself onto the floor.

A stiff, angular object dug into his heel. He voiced an involuntary “ouch” and bent down to examine.

Barely peeking out from under the bed was a sky blue notebook. With a strangely overpowering pique of curiosity, Link flipped open the cover.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> acute trigger warning.

After a long moment of gasping and shaking in front of the mirror with his hands gripping the bathroom sink, Rhett finally regained his breaths and dried his tears. But as soon as he stepped back into his bedroom and saw what was in Link’s hands, his barely mustered resolve crumbled like pastry.

“Rhett, what is this?”

He parted his lips, but guilt and despair choked his words behind the lump in his throat.

“Rhett, please, you’re freaking me out. How do you know I ran into a woman named Christy?”

“You…you did?”

“I ran into this blonde woman in the gym and I somehow knew her name was Christy before she told me. I felt like I know her really well but I was sure I’ve never met her before. Wait, are you saying you wrote this down without knowing that it happened?”

Rhett closed his eyes. The whole universe might as well be a cruel joke, because evidently it was set on a path to destroy him. For a brief moment it dangled a brilliant power in front of him and made him believe that he could have the man he loved, but in a mere matter of hours the universe had thrust the blue-eyed brunet back towards the woman that he clearly belonged with.

“Rhett, please, what are you not telling me?”

Even with an anxious frown punctuated by pain and anger gleaming in those icy blue eyes, Link was still the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

“Link, what I wrote, it’s…it’s not what I know. It’s what I wished would be true.”

Link scrutinized his eyes that looked dark olive in the candlelight, seemingly unable to make sense of the words he just heard.

Rhett felt despair in the form of a painful fever smoldering in his lungs and radiating into his veins, but he had no choice but to tell the truth. He dragged his steps towards his desk, took out the silver pen and showed it to Link.

“This is Jules Verne’s pen. I found it when I was in Europe. It makes what I write come true.”

Link gaped at him as if he was explaining Greek grammar in Greek.

“That’s not…”

Link blurted out but paused upon the realization of what had happened throughout the day, how he woke up as if part of his memory has been wiped and snippets of facts were superimposed in its place, how he felt as if his relationship with Rhett was as abstract as a bullet point, and how he was overwhelmed by the feeling of seeing the real version of his life as soon as he laid eyes on the blonde woman named Christy.

“…possible.” Link’s voice was reduced to a whisper as he dropped his eyes back on the page in front of him. “But why…”

Why, if Rhett could change anything with this pen, would he wish for Link to have never met this mysterious woman?

Images, words and intelligible fragments of experience started drifting to the surface of his mind. He remembered roller skates, bad pop songs blaring in the background, the scent of sweat, pizza and spilled soda drying in a cloying chemical smell; the velvety, delicate skin of a feminine hand; sitting shoulder to shoulder on the campus lawn, raising closed eyes to the warm summer sun…

Soft blonde hair sliding between his fingers. Tasting the smile on a pair of soft full lips.

“I do know her, don’t I?” Link’s voice trembled and his eyes shimmered like undulating lakes on a summer night.

Rhett was completely paralyzed by the accusing, interrogating gaze of the bluest eyes he had ever known. He felt the sickening despair of a man slowly approaching a cliff, standing over the edge and blissfully tempted by the call of the void. He leapt.

“You do. You were gonna propose to her, Link. I…I panicked, I don’t know, I just…I thought I was gonna lose you…”

Rhett’s words finally restored the missing jigsaw puzzle piece of memory in Link’s mind. As if electrocuted by an onslaught of emotions, his whole body jerked with a violent shiver and the notebook fell from his traumatized fingers and crashed onto the floor. The soft white pages failed to support their own weight and collapsed into an accordion of creases.

“I thought I was going to lose you. You would belong to someone else, Link, you wouldn’t need to see me anymore, you wouldn’t need to spend time with me, it would never be the same. I never even got a chance to tell you I love you, and I thought I had lost that chance forever because you were marrying someone else.”

“She was pregnant, Rhett!” Link’s words choked out in a strangled scream. Rhett froze with his mouth agape and his eyes glazed with horror.

“Oh god, Link…I…I didn’t know.” Rhett felt as if a hundred knives were held in a bundle and punctured his chest all at once, inching deeper and deeper into his heart. He pleaded wordlessly with bleary eyes, but the icy blue pair looked away and the soft pink lips remained a hard pressed line. For a few minutes the small bedroom echoed with angry, hitched breaths and broken sobs.

 “You ended a life! You ended the life of my child!” Link’s voice cracked around a hoarse growl. His chest heaved in shudders and his cheeks shone with tears.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Rhett’s words came out in a helpless whisper.

“ _That’s_ what’s wrong with this to you? That I didn’t tell you?”

Rhett cringed at the furious growl and hang his head between slumped shoulders.

“Because what I did was out of wedlock and it was wrong and I don’t fucking need you to tell me that. Because you would tell me that if I get married because I feel obligated to, it wouldn’t be fair to the baby. Because that’s how you think Rhett, that you know everything; that every thought in that ridiculous head is gonna enlighten the whole fucking world. If I told you, I would have to live the rest of my life seeing that stupid look in your eyes that you know something you disapprove of. But guess what, Rhett? You would be wrong, just like so many times before. I love her and I love my child, and you took that away from me!”

The delicate blue eyes shot flames through the deep shadow cast by Link’s prominent brow bones. They pierced Rhett’s conscience with stone-cold, furious accusations of betrayal. Rhett knew that his blood brother had never looked at him with an expression so similar to hatred. He felt like he was drowning in air, like every breath he took dragged him deeper into a watery grave. Part of him was almost grateful, part of him did not want to ever breathe again, not without Link in his life.

“Do you even realize what you’ve done? It’s _murder_ Rhett, there’s no other word for it.”

“Link, please. I never meant to…I’m so sorry…I love you.” Rhett reached out with despair, but Link flinched away from his trembling fingers.

“You’re never going to forgive me, are you?” Rhett’s thick eyebrows quivered with pain. “I don’t blame you, Link. I don’t deserve you to forgive me. Just move on without me and be happy. Go find her and live the life that you’re meant to have—”

“I had the life that I was meant to have, Rhett, and you destroyed it!” Link slammed his fist into the wall and Rhett cringed. “There’s no do-over when my child had already died!”

“Please, Link, dying is not the same as not being born…” Shocked by the words slipped out of desperation, Rhett froze in horror. He had never regretted saying something with more anguish. He watched his best friend’s beautiful eyes grow wider with pain, shock and fury. And then, the only person he had ever loved stormed out of his room and slammed the door.

Rhett collapsed onto the floor. He leaned his head against his desk drawers and closed his eyes, but tears continued to flow down his cheeks. For the first time in as long as he could remember, Rhett let himself cry out loud.

He remained immobile in his paralyzed position on the floor. His mind was doomed to race uncontrollably though unacceptable possibilities after unacceptable possibilities. At 10 pm he had given up hope on ever living with Link again, and thought for sure he would have to start packing up his things and look for a new apartment as soon as morning arrives. At 12am he struggled to breathe through strained sobs and stared mindlessly at the candlelight heart on the floor, thinking that he should start with those pathetic plastic widgets that seemed so idiotic and useless now, but every time he reached towards them he thought of the golden glow on Link’s skin and the passionate moment they shared that he was not ready to forget. So he stayed limp and defeated on the floor and stubbornly allowed the tea lights to keep flickering while his skin desperately clung to the ghost of Link’s warmth. At 2 am he realized that he could never live in this town again, not in the same place that Link would inevitably take his entire life into another person’s arms, get married, and live a life without him. At 3 am he preoccupied himself with the contemplations of names of places on the opposite end of the country, but each version of his life without his one true love would be equally as bleak as a barren plain of dying grass writhing under a grey sky, no matter where it might take place. At 4 am he cried convulsively at the realization that it was simply not possible for him to live without the true wish of his heart.

Maybe the answer was not distance but obliteration. Maybe what he needed to do was to literally write himself out of the picture. Maybe the Pandora’s box that created the disaster was the only antidote.

He inched forward on the floor to pick up the sky-blue notebook and turned to a blank page already creased from when Link had dropped it. Gripping the pen with every last ounce of strength in his exhausted body, his hand shook uncontrollably and his throat burned with painful gasps that barely offered him any oxygen.

“Link deserves to live the rest of his life in the kind of happiness he chooses for himself because he is a beautiful person with a beautiful soul. He will be loved, and he will be free to love the person that he belongs with. He won’t be troubled by pain or betrayal because the person who hurt him most would not have existed. Because I, Rhett James McLaughlin, the person that he thought he knew, that he thought was his best friend, was never—”

At the end of his twenty-four hour long emotional torrent, he could barely breathe and his whole body was shaking with violent sobs. He wasn’t ready to bid farewell to his very existence, but he was not ready to exist in utter loneliness either.

But after all, dying is not the same as never being born.


	8. Chapter 8

Link gripped the edge of the dinner table until all his knuckles were bright white. Broken sobs shook his body and rivulets of tears spattered onto the cheap wood grain. He no longer knew how long he had been pacing furiously around the apartment feeling torn apart by betrayal, by the fact that the one person he thought he loved had manipulated and shattered his future. He stared at the faint trace of char crusted on the inside of the glass baking dish where the half-finished lasagna sat cold and stiff, and the infuriatingly perfect bouquet next to it looking callously vibrant and colorful. Rage flooded through his mind in dizzying waves, and he gripped the table even tighter to stop himself from picking up the arrangement and throwing it across the room.

Eventually his eyes landed on the wine bottle on the edge of the table. He picked it up with a sweep and threw a sizeable gulp down his throat. The burn of the alcohol made him grimace, but the sudden heady rush was oddly comforting against the violent onslaught of anger and despair.

He slammed the bottle down with a hollow thump and felt utterly abandoned. There was no fiancé to run to and seek comfort from, no child to fill his mind with panicked anticipation and chase out everything else, and worst of all, no best friend to share a drink with while dumping out the mess in his mind like emptying an old backpack. In the course of a single day, he had lost everything.

A breeze snaked through the window and slithered around Link’s body with the chill of the darkest hours of a late summer night. He shivered and breathed in the lush, verdant scent of vivacious greenery, and fell powerless under the crash of memories.

It was several summers ago when he sat on the lower rock staring at the Cape Fear river with his back to his best friend, while his mind was held hostage by the anxiety of their pending departure to college. The sun was slowly but surely devoured by rainclouds, and a light drizzle had started to seep through his cotton T-shirt and drip down his hair. He breathed in the rinsed petrichor and moistened soil and shivered in the light rain, huddling his own chest with his thin arms.

“Time to go home, Link.” The voice of his best friend called out from the higher rock behind him, youthful and cheery but already taking on the pleasant reverberation of a charming baritone.

“I don’t wanna go just yet.”

“Why not?”

For a second Link could not put his hesitation into words.

“It’s cold there too.” He mumbled.

“What?” Rhett raised his voice incrementally and asked in confusion. When he heard no answer he scrambled off the higher rock and plopped himself next to Link on the lower ground. The shorter boy felt the searching gaze of those forest green eyes and pretended to be wiping rainwater off his face while he quickly checked the temperature of his cheeks with the back of his hand. Hopefully he wasn’t blushing.

“There’s not exactly hours of family fun waiting for me in my house, Rhett.” He mumbled begrudgingly, gulping down the guilt of playing the broken-home card when it was utterly uncalled for.

“I could come over and hang for a while if you want.”

“Don’t you have packing to do?”

“Well, yeah but we’ve got another week and I can always drive back and pick up whatever I forgot. We’re not going far.”

“Physically no.”

“What do you mean?” Rhett set his sharp chin in his hands and knotted his thick eyebrows.

Link sighed at the melodrama of what he was about to say. “We’re eighteen, Rhett. This is adulthood. This is fucking _it_.”

“I know! Aren’t you excited?”

“I am, but…what if I screw up?”

“Link, you’re like…scarily responsible. Your stupid closet looks better than my term paper. Sometimes I wonder if you’re even a kid and not some kind of alien robot put on earth to teach humanity planning and organization. The worst I can see you screw up is probably dropping a hot pocket or something.”

“Dude, that’s not what I mean.”

“What do you mean then?”

“Like…being a _man_ , Rhett. Like all that expectation to…to thrive in masculinity or whatever and be a pillar of the community and all that stuff. I sure as hell don’t feel that right now. What if that never comes to me? What if I don’t know how to be a man because…”

“Because what?”

“Because no one was there to teach me!” Link choked out and felt exasperated by his petulant self. He let out another sigh. “I don’t wanna whine but…I’ve never really shared a life with my own father. What do I model my fucking _life_ after?”

Without a word Rhett inched closer to him until their hips were pressed against each other. He plastered half of his chest on Link’s back, reached both of his long arms around Link’s body and wrapped him in a tight, protective loop.

“You don’t have to model your life after anyone or anything. You are more than smart enough to figure it out on your own, Link.” The blue-eyed boy felt his heart quicken under the sheer expanse of bodily contact and tried very hard to nod calmly and focus on listening, digging his sharp canines into his soft lip. “Think about it, if every person just lives their life as an imitation of their parents, there would only be one profession in the whole damn world because every life would just be a clone of the previous generation. Every person deserves their own dreams and their own mistakes, and you deserve even more. Plus, you know you’re gonna do something awesome when your best friend is _me_.” Link did not need to turn around to see the conceited smirk that he was all too familiar with. He couldn’t turn around anyway. The thin arms around him were too tight and the heart-shaped lips parted by a smile would be too irresistible.

“Oh gosh. You’re gonna plunge me into a life of crime, aren’t you?” Link feigned a sullen tone.

“That does sound kinda awesome doesn’t it?”

Link responded with nothing but a dramatic eye-roll.

“Hey.” Rhett lightly shook the thin shoulders trapped between his arms.

“What?” Link turned incrementally towards the olive-grey eyes and immediately turned back when he realized how close their lips would have been.

“You’re gonna be a man and you’re gonna be great at it. And if anyone thinks any less of you I’ll break their stupid face.”

A few chuckles started rising from Link’s chest like the early-blooming popcorns in a scorching pot. Soon their shared laughter cracked through the rain-dampened air and shook the two teenage bodies against each other in synchrony.

They sat there for a few more moments on that ordinary summer afternoon, staring at their beloved river flowing into the distance. There was no gut-wrenching confession, no dramatic kiss, searching hands or desperate moans, just trepid rain peppering Link’s body, the refreshing scent of moistened soil and vibrant greens rushing into his nostrils, and the comforting warmth from his best friend’s lean chest firm as a rock and a pair of oddly strong teenage arms that felt like home.

Fresh tears seeped out of the corners of Link’s eyes and added to the dried and crusted trails. He was leaping into matrimony and the creation of a new life for the world—that has got to be the epitome of manliness and adulthood, right? So why would his best friend who supported and protected him through all these years take that away from him?

And why, for _fuck_ ’s sake, was there a small voice in the back of his mind humming a sickening tune of relief?

He knew how special she was. Her smile was the only one that rivaled the dizzying brightness of the smile of his best friend. She was thoughtful, kind-hearted and beautiful, and he loved her company. He would have proposed to her even without the pregnancy.

_That was before you knew how Rhett truly felt about you_. The small voice in his mind whispered and froze him in place.

“But I love her!” He argued with his own mind.

_But you loved him first._ The small voice enunciated with smug conviction.

_You love him more._

Suddenly his best friends’ arms around him was the only thing he could think about. How they hugged him in their naïve tender years with the purest childish joy untainted by the troubles of the world; how they comforted him after every unsatisfying grade, every hurtful word spoken by a mean-spirited peer, every rejection and every heartbreak; how they lingered around him with tantalizing warmth while gentle fingers danced on his developing bicep, lunging his heart into an intoxicating palpitation. That’s what he would never be ready to give up for anything—the embrace of his best friend, the embrace of the man he loved.

Link suddenly felt light-headed. Perhaps it was the sheer exhaustion from being awake at four in the morning, perhaps it was the alcohol that he threw down his throat. Perhaps it was the realization that they had always loved each other more than they realized, and he simply never let his best friend love him like he wanted to.

He let go of the last few sobs, wiped his eyes dry, gathered his strength and walked up to Rhett’s door.

“Rhett?” He followed his question with a soft knock and heard no response.

“I can see your light still on. I just wanna talk.”

Silence was all he heard.

“Come on Rhett.” Link leaned his head on the door and spoke more softly. “You’re my best friend and we just had _sex_. You can’t just avoid me forever.”

The lack of response started gnawing at him in the most disconcerting way. Link wrapped his fingers around the doorknob, gave it a tentative twist and felt no resistance.

“Alright I’m coming in.”

The sight in front of him seized his heart with the kind of pain that could only come from being broken. Rhett’s tall, proud frame was shrunken into a defeated hunch on the floor, shaking violently with choked sobs. His hand was trembling with the silver pen in its grip, giving off a twinkling glean from the heart-shaped sea of candles on the floor that still flickered like a ruthless flame.

Link dashed to his best friend’s side and crouched down beside him, raising a gentle hand to cover his quivering shoulder. His eyes landed on the notebook laying open in his lap. It looked like a fresh page with handwriting so shaky that it was barely recognizable, and wrinkled damp spots from fallen tears. Link gingerly picked it up with a curious frown. He couldn’t help the sharp gasp from the words he saw.

“Rhett, what are you doing? What are you trying to write?”

The sobbing blond simply covered his face with his palm. Link sidestepped to be face to face with him and knelt down on the floor across from the tall blond. He wrapped his hand around Rhett’s wrist and slowly pulled it away from his face. The tear-flooded green eyes finally looked at him.

“Rhett, what is that last word?”

The heart-shaped lips curled up and silently formed the shape of the word “born”.

Link was seized by horror and a sudden rush of anger. He tore the page from the notebook and shredded it between his fingers.

“Link…”

“Don’t. How dare you?” The harsh words rushed out without a chance for editing.

“It would be for the better, Link. You belong with her.” Rhett mumbled in a weak voice cracking at every syllable from the abuse of extended crying.                                     

“And what? You’re gonna _die_ for that? Jesus Rhett, what were you thinking?”

“Dying is not the same as never being born.” Rhett said with a hauntingly hollow stare into an indeterminate distance.

“It doesn’t work like that, Rhett! You wrote that I never met her and I ran into her and remembered everything within a day! You’ve lived twenty-two years! Like it or not, you’ve made a mark in this world and become a part of so many people’s lives—people who love you will remember you and they will never get an answer to why you’re gone or what happened! Your mom, your dad, your brother, _me_! You can’t just erase yourself because you are a part of each one of us. We’ll be living in pain for the rest of our lives!”

“But I’ve done such a heinous thing Link. I took your marriage and your child. I deserve to be punished for that.”

Link pulled his best friend’s hand toward himself and clutched it to his heart with an agonized sigh. He squeezed his eyes shut and took a few deep breaths through the painful silence. When he opened his eyes again they were hardened with icy blue determination.

“Yes you do.”

He reached out and gently brushed Rhett’s other hand with his fingertips, and with a sudden movement he snatched the silver pen from his friend’s weak palm and promptly snapped it in half. Viscose ink cascaded out of the broken metal tube like blood from a gashing wound, and rained onto the pristine pages of the sky blue notebook lying open on the floor. Link tossed the broken pen down onto the unwritten pages and flipped the notebook close with a loud thud.

“Link…”

The brunet didn’t wait for the rest of that sentence. He gently nudged a curled index finger under the neat line of beard and pulled Rhett’s sharp chin in for a soft, lingering kiss.

“I love you.”

“But…without that pen…I can never set this right. I could have rewritten everything to be the way it was supposed to be—”

“No. No more cheating reality.” The brunet glided the back of his hand down the blond’s face, and Rhett eagerly leaned into the caress and held the hand of his lover in place. “This should never have been an option. The point of growing up is learning to live with the consequences of your actions. You don’t write your future with dreams and fantasies, you write it with what you do.”

“But what about her? Your fiancée?”

“She’s not my fiancée. I haven’t asked and she hasn’t said ‘yes’.”

“But she would have. Who would pass up the chance of living a life time with _you_?”

“I…” Link was suddenly speechless. He gently pulled his best friend’s hand away from his tear-moistened face and clasped his trembling fingers between his hands.

“She’s a really smart girl, Rhett. I think she might have figured out how I truly felt about you even before I did. Before I admitted it to myself, at least. She was always pushing me to tell her everything about you, why I would only go to the same college as you, what we do together…This one time we were fighting over something stupid and I said I’d rather spent the weekend with you. She threw a phone at me.”

“But you were having a child together. She must have turned around…”

Link slowly shook his head and softly kissed his lover’s hand. “She deserves to have a child, Rhett. There’s no doubt about that. She’s a wonderful person and she deserves the best. She deserves someone who loves her and only her, that’s who she should have a child with. And that’s not me.”

The distraught green eyes drifted about on Link’s face and the heart-shaped lips twitched but didn’t find their words. So the brunet pressed the trembling fingers between his hands back onto his heart.

“I love you, Rhett. I love you so god damn much. I can never give all of my love to anyone else because you will always come first.”

“I love you too, you know that. But…how can you be with me without constantly being reminded of what I’ve done? How can you possibly forgive me for this?”

“There’s only one thing you’ve done that I will never forgive you for, and that is trying to take yourself out of my life.” Link stared deep into the beautiful forest green eyes shimmering with fresh tears, and made sure that his voice was firm and his words rang with gravitas.

“And don’t you _dare_ ever try that again.”


End file.
